It has now been over a week since we left Kasambiika 1. Most
of us have already reverted back to our home environments, but we all still
hold warm memories of the village. We left with heavy hearts and full
stomachs. After hosting a dinner for the
whole community, our VHTs threw us a surprise party, which happened to coincide
with the request of another villager who wanted us to attend his house for a
dinner party. The Kasaambiika 1 intern team was not afraid of challenges,
especially challenges involving food—it's true, one time Raphael ate 5 bowls of
porridge then ate a whole egg in one bite! Just kidding that was me—and we ate
at all of them.
Before we get into the lessons and our closing thoughts, we
need to make a quick shout out to Mama, the woman who cooked and housed us.
Miss ya mama!
Lessons learned
All of us learned a lot about working with different
personalities, both within the group and our village stakeholders. We all put
aside differences to work together towards our common goal: improving the
health of Kasambiika 1 and empowering its residents to make healthy decisions.
One thing we all had to work together on was leaving
Kasambiika Primary School with a new paint job. Most of us had left the village
by the time this got finished, but Tina was still around and got this picture.
In Lusoga this says wash your hands every day. Before you
eat, after you use the latrine, after you play.
Sometimes there are problems that you have to leave behind.
Throughout our entire internship we could tell that there were underlying
tensions between the health center and the village population. We could not do
anything to fix these problems while we were in the village. We did not want to
cause more harm than good, and we did not have the permanent presence to make
sure everything was resolved. We hope that the UVP staff is better able to
mediate between the two parties and work towards a more harmonious health
system in K1.
Closing thoughts for the summer
This was our final project for the UVP staff. For everyone
outside of UVP and Uganda village life, annotations follow.
0:00-0:59 to the song “Pretty Boy Swag” by Soulja Boi. This
song is about our head VHT, Swaga. Swaga made a huge difference in our
outreaches for the village. He was instrumental in mobilizing, planning,
presenting, and pretty much everything else we did in the village. This is our
tribute to him and the other VHTs.
1:00-1:45 to the song “Ignition (remix)” by R Kelly. This
song is about promoting birth control in the village. A laysoo is the
traditional Busoga waist covering worn by Josie in our video. Pills, depo, and
IUDs are all birth control devices that we promote in our UVP work. We only
provided the Depo shot once during the internship (Maureen brought it, as the
song suggests), but more options are available at the health center. Also,
other NGOs like Marie Stopes work to promote birth control in the villages.
2:00-2:39 to the song “Hot n Cold” by Katy Perry. This song
(sung by my sister, thanks Naomi!) is a story of a child getting malaria. A
baby child was the subject because children under five (and pregnant women) are
more prone to getting malaria. Small children's immune systems are not
developed, and for pregnant women's immune systems are weakened by the strain
of pregnancy. Towards the end of the song we emphasize the importance of
prevention and recommend two methods: sleeping under bed nets and clearing
stagnant water. We mention misdiagnosis in the song. During baseline surveys we
asked what the symptoms of malaria were and we often got answers that
corresponded more with a common cold or virus than malaria. While you can still
get these symptoms if you have malaria, sometimes when a child or adult is sick
in the village it is just a bacterial or viral infection instead. People,
especially children, should not take anti-malarials for illnesses that are not
malaria.
2:40-3:25 to the song “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen.
This song is about our shallow well request forms. Kasambiika had two boreholes
and one shallow well. Water access was a problem in our village, as in many of
the other launch villages. We hope that if adequate shallow well sites are
found that UVP can start digging soon.
3:25-6:18 to the song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore. This song
covers the lighter side of village life. The first verse is about getting
vaccines to go to Uganda, and complaining about having to take Doxycycline as
an anti-malarial every day. We were lucky to have prophylaxis, as the people in
our village do not have access to the kind of malarial prevention that we could
afford. There are a number of other jokes in this song, so comment on this post
or send us a question if you want anything else explained.
Miss you Kasambiika! Warm regards from Kampala and
America.
The K1 team
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